Embracing Okra

In the years when I lived full-time in Senegal, I would make a trip to the United States once or twice a year to see my parents in Illinois, staying for a couple of weeks or sometimes a month. Soon after my arrival, they would cajole me into the kitchen, and I was glad to go along with it. I’d pull out a few sets of pots and pans, and crush onions and cloves of garlic in the food processor to get started with the cooking.

My parents could cook, of course. My mother seemed to practically live in the kitchen when I was growing up, making meals and snacks every day, whipping up birthday cakes for each of her four children, preparing plates of barbecue wings for church picnics or casseroles for bereaved friends or neighbors, even special treats for our school trips. A while ago, after a lifetime of such service, she decided she was tired and hung up her apron. 

My father picked up the slack, but he was a terrible cook. He would never follow recipes and would try to make everything healthier, replacing sugar with stevia, cutting out butter without adding anything in its place, subbing in bone broth for milk in waffles and pancakes. He generally made his food unenjoyable, even to himself.

On my visits, I’d throw together soups from whatever was available in the pantry or in season at the farmers’ market—tomatoes, pumpkins, carrots or lentils or broccoli or split peas. I’d make sure that family staples like collard greens and black-eyed peas were always on hand. And I’d fire up the oven to bake rustic leek tarts and mushroom quiches and banana or zucchini or sweet potato quick breads. And I cooked all manner of sauces meant to be served over rice or pasta. I froze the sauces and the soups in small glass storage containers and stocked them in the extra freezer in the basement so my parents could have them for the coming months, so I could feed them long after I was gone.

Zainab Bukar, 50, sun-dries chopped okra in Abuja, Nigeria, 2026. Photo by Light Oriye Tamunotonye/AFP via Getty Images

One request my parents always made was for my simple okra sauce: chopped okra stewed with onions, ginger, garlic, tomatoes, a little hot pepper, and some fish (both fresh and smoked). I cooked it all together until the sauce was thick and slippery. This is my version of Senegal’s soupou kanja, but so reinvented that most Senegalese folks wouldn’t recognize it. Senegalese cooks might chop and stew the okra with those same ingredients but probably also would drop in a light green diaxatou (a kind of bitter eggplant), yët (a dried sea snail), meats such as lamb or beef, netetou (the fermented seeds of the locust bean tree), shellfish (usually shrimp, but sometimes crab or mussels or dried oysters ), squid or cuttlefish, and always a thick layer of blood-orange-colored palm oil, smoky and unctuous.

I love the taste of African palm oil, but too much makes my stomach cramp, so I either add a tablespoon for flavor or, more often, just skip it. I also skip the miscellaneous meats (I haven’t eaten red meat since I was a moody fifteen-year-old). And I haven’t gone near oysters since I chanced upon a bad one a while ago; projectile vomiting ensued. And since diaxatou and yët are almost impossible to find in central Illinois, I go without these ingredients as well. To a Senegalese cuisine stickler, the absence of those ingredients might disqualify it as a true soupou kanja, but without those trappings, my simple sauce instead highlights the delicate, grassy, sweet flavor of the okra. My parents and I would eat the sauce with gusto. But if any of my siblings or my nieces were visiting, they would only peer inside the pot dubiously, cutting the spoon through the sauce and wincing at the way it oozed. No matter how delicious its flavor, they would push it away. Too slimy, they said. Like an insult. 

As a child, I snubbed the vegetable and its ooze too. The only type of okra I liked was the fried kind, mercifully non-slimy. On our trips to visit family in Arkansas, we’d get it at my grandfather’s regular spot, Young’s Fish Market in North Little Rock, along with a couple of orders of fried catfish or walleye, served with slices of sharp white onion, yellow mustard, and sweet pickles. The okra tasted like cornmeal and the special flavor conferred by hot oil that children almost always seem to love. I wonder if there is something evolutionary about it, a primal search for fat and a dense dose of calories meant to help us through lean times. Fried okra was one of the culinary highlights of those childhood visits, along with jelly donuts from Shipley; my grandmother’s savory grits (cooked simply, perhaps even indifferently, but perfect somehow); my great-aunt Del’s pecan pie; and roasted salted peanuts in the shell.

Del was short for Delcenea, named so because my great-grandfather fought in Italy during the First World War and was inspired to give his children Italianate names. Along with Del, there was Angelo, Cicero, and Lorene. I don’t know if he also took to Italian gastronomy, but the Lewis family tables I encountered three generations later were full of Southern classics: fried chicken, fluffy biscuits, corn bread and collard greens, and sometimes, a dish Aunt Del made that my father called “slimy okra,” just chopped and cooked until it reduced to a goo, flavored with salt and maybe a little garlic. But honestly, I can’t tell you what that slimy okra tasted like because I don’t think I ever ate it. I just looked at that pale green blob of vomit on my father’s plate in horror and thought, There but for the grace of God. When my mother surveyed my plate and insisted on a vegetable, I probably just accepted a leaf or two from the pot of collard greens. I didn’t like them either, but their bitter flavor could be masked if I mixed them with some candied yams.

These days, okra doesn’t even figure very high on the latest polls of the least favorite foods in the United States, where hatred overflows for liver and sardines.

Modern North American palates often have trouble with slime—especially in mainstream American cuisine, where viscosity (an element of slime) is rarely a virtue and often a disqualification. Texture aversion is a frequent reason folks reject certain foods—too soft, too rough, too mushy—and sometimes the undesirable texture of a thing outweighs its delicious flavor. A 2020 study on textures and food rejection posited that some people may be disinclined toward unfamiliar textures; or they might have learned certain food aversions from their parents. Some might believe that slimy foods are unhealthy since such textures, as the researchers noted, “may provoke a sense of disgust as it may indicate microbial growth and pathogen presence.”

The plant’s mucilage is to thank for this—a thick, sticky substance that most plants create, some in their roots and barks, some in their stems and leaves, others in or around their seeds. Okra produces much more mucilage than many other plants, and the clear gel that surrounds its seeds helps the seeds retain water during droughts.

These days, okra doesn’t even figure very high on the latest polls of the least favorite foods in the United States, where hatred overflows for liver and sardines. When I look for okra at grocery stores in Springfield, Illinois, or in Chicago where I sometimes live, I have to try a few places before I can find some, rarely fresh even at the height of growing season, more often a packet or two in the frozen vegetable aisle. I wonder if the reason for this okra scarcity is because of the cold erasure of unloved things, pushed out of stores by naysayers. So, okra, as the authors of Lost Crops of Africa wrote two decades ago, is still “living on the hearth of neglect amid the ashes of scorn.”

The precise origins of okra are a lingering botanical debate. It is a tropical plant, a member of the mallow family, which also includes cocoa, cotton, hibiscus, and marsh mallow. Its close cousins are common across South Asia, so it may have evolved there, but research has also pointed to a homeland in eastern Africa, likely Ethiopia. Wherever it started on its unique journey, it later dispersed across trade routes through Asia and Africa and parts of the Mediterranean first, crossing the Atlantic in later centuries to the Americas.

Tracing the old-world okra sightings led me down a succession of rabbit holes, in search of the tantalizing material clues to its culinary trajectory. An often-referenced thirteenth-century manuscript about Egypt by Andalusian botanist Abu al-Abbas al-Nabati, thought to contain one of the first mentions of okra, seems lost to the archives, but is cited in the writings of his disciples.

I despaired of being able to find texts I could read and judge for myself, but then I stumbled upon the 1204 manuscript by doctor-philosopher Abd al-Latif al-Baghdādī, who wrote The Book of Edification and Admonition: Things Eye-Witnessed and Events Personally Observed in the Land of Egypt. (Egyptian novelist Mansoura Ez-Eldin writes in the foreword of a new English translation of the book by British Arabist Tim Mackintosh-Smith that “[f]rom the jolter fish to crocodiles and skinks, al-Baghdādī leaves no aspect of Egypt without comment: plants, animals, topography, architecture, cuisine.”) On the okra plant—bamia in Arabic—al-Baghdādī noted that it was an Egyptian food, which suggests that he hadn’t seen it in his hometown of Baghdad, or in his previous travels to Aleppo or Damascus. But when he found it in or near Cairo, he wrote that it had “fruits the size of a thumb, deep green in color and something like baby cucumbers, but covered with a fuzz of tiny bristles.” He wrote that its seeds were sweet but astringent, and that this mouth-puckering effect was countered by the pods’ slime. The plant was well used in the kitchen: “The Egyptians cook okra with meat, chopping it up small with the peel still on; it is not a bad dish.” I found a recipe for a similar dish in The Pharaoh’s Kitchen: Recipes from Ancient Egypt’s Enduring Food Traditions, by Magda Mehdawy and Amr Hussein, although here the okra is mashed and stewed with beef stock, onions, and coriander.

A note in that cookbook sent me in another direction, including a nineteenth-century French Egyptologist who the cookbook authors said had found the “remains of okra.” I was determined to learn more and looked up his books in French and English but could find no such detail. He had written that an Italian archaeologist’s excavations a half century before turned up a depiction of okra on one wall of the rock-cut tombsof Beni-Hasan, which date from circa 2055 to 1795 BCE. Some scholars doubted the Italian’s interpretation of the image, and when I tracked down a copy of the illustration on the New York Public Library’s website,I understood why. In it, three men attend to a bower of tall, leafy plants, and harvest the cylindrical fruits that they find, which could be okra or another green thing, maybe a cucumber. The depiction certainly differs from how I’ve seen okra grow, as singular plants in orderly rows. But the Italian wrote that the leaves and fruits look similar to those found in a well-known book on Egyptian flora by a sixteenth-century botanist, and although the arrangement of the plants, “bent in an arch, like a pergola,” might seem unusual, he reassured readers that “[i]n a similar manner, I have seen okra cultivated in Cairo in a garden.”

In their book on pharaonic cookery, Mehdawy and Hussein suggest that such tomb depictions had strategic spiritual value and were not just decorative. “In the Old Kingdom,” they write, “the deceased would be buried with a list of delicacies in the hopes that the inscribed foods would forever keep his or her hunger satiated. The ancients also believed that the inscriptions carried a deep magic that would renew the supply of the deceased’s favorite foods endlessly and at will. Images of the harvest, grape picking, hunting scenes, and fish pictured on tomb walls were thought to have similar powers.” Perhaps this harvested okra would provide for them, feeding their spirits, even in the afterlife.

By the time I was a young adult, I’d outgrown my scorn for okra and had begun to embrace it in its natural American habitat: a pot of gumbo. My mother’s recipe would start with a roux, adding a Creole mirepoix of onions, celery, and bell pepper, stewing it with chopped okra, tomatoes, lots of fish and shrimp, and a little thyme. Once that recipe nestled itself within my heart, I learned to appreciate okra in other places too: orders of bhindi masala from a neighborhood restaurant; pickled okra from the farmers’ market; whole okra pods tossed in olive oil, salt, and pepper and roasted in the oven until caramelized.

Later, I grew okra in a Brooklyn community garden and on my rooftop garden in Dakar, where only a few plants ever flourished but where the okra’s pale yellow flowers would bloom without fail, transforming into bright green pods. One summer, I tended the plants in my parents’ summer garden patch, where okra thrived among the tomatoes and zucchini. This was around the beginning of the pandemic, and I couldn’t return to Senegal because the borders were closed and all commercial flights were canceled. I remember taking over an empty room in my parents’ house, with a window overlooking a backyard pond. I watched the geese fly past, heading across time zones and borders, and contemplated the garden patch where the okra plants muscled their way past their neighbors, higher and higher, to catch more sun.

We tried to harvest the fruit pods early, while they were still small and tender. But I could swear those pods camouflaged themselves between the stalks and leaves, and every few days I would find one that had grown long and then hardened, a sly middle finger to my plans. An old pod gets woody, tough, fit only for seeds—and maybe that’s the point, the plant’s propensity to propagate itself, to foster a new life at the end of its own.

That summer, we ate well: gumbo, my okra stew, and my mother’s favorite—a sauté of okra cut up into thick rounds and cooked with fresh tomatoes, onions, garlic, salt, maybe a bit of thyme if we were feeling fancy. It was a good summer.

Okra made the journey across the Atlantic along with enslaved Africans, although no one quite knows how. I haven’t yet seen any slave-ship manifests that show it loaded on as provisions. Nor does it seem likely, to my mind, that, as the myth goes, African women sewed the seeds in their hair before being sold into slavery—to prepare for an uncertain future. But who knows? In the context of the wars and stratagems and commercial contracts that led millions of people to be enslaved, when any moment might result in the devastation of your home and fields and the scattering of your family and community, you might devise ways to keep your valuables always on you. And seeds, surely, must be counted as one of the most valuable possessions.

According to Jessica B. Harris, a culinary historian of the African diaspora, linguistic evidence suggests that Africans had a hand in okra’s transplantation, since the word okra appears to be a derivation of an Igbo word for the vegetable (okuru). And many linguists believe the word gumbo may come from Bantu languages, where okra is known as kingombo or cingombo, which also gave Spanish its word for it, quingombo.

In parts of West Africa and Brazil, okra is a sacred food, sometimes prepared to feed the divine spirits, Xangô or the Ibeji twins.

By the mid-seventeenth century, okra was making appearances in South America and even Jamaica, where the British naturalist Hans Sloane espied two varieties in the 1680s. Sloane shared that many parts of the plant could help treat ailments of the lungs, stomach, and kidneys, among others, as decoctions or plasters. As for the foods made from it, he said they were believed to be “extreamly Nourishing and very Venereal, being very viscous or mucilaginous,” functioning as an aphrodisiac, and, perhaps, conferring its unique properties for making things slick onto those who consumed it. This slickness was also important for another of its folk applications in the Caribbean—one that Sloane didn’t record—as an abortifacient.

When you mix mucilage and water together, as in an okra stew, the mucilage binds to the water and creates that distinctive gloopy, stretchy texture—the slime. Harris observed that many dishes in Brazil and in Africa “make a point of releasing as much of the ooze as possible, resulting in thick glue-like sheets of almost elastic consistency.” This is what many West Africans call the “draw,” which the Nigerian food writer Yewande Komolafe has described as having an “elemental viscosity.” This texture helps eaters to consume starchy foods like fufu or couscous or rice, smoothing the way down the throat and into the stomach. At least one study from Nigeria found that local farmers prized okra varieties with more viscosity—the slimier the better. Okra helps everything stick together.

It’s no wonder that in parts of West Africa and Brazil okra is a sacred food, sometimes prepared to feed the divine spirits, Xangô or the Ibeji twins. I am reminded of the striking photos from Brazilian artist Ayrson Heráclito’s series Bori, in which he reimagines the ritual feeding of orixás by arranging the sacred foods around the heads of his supine subjects. In one, a man’s peaceful face peeks out from a curtain of green okra, their angled points resembling undulations. Here, an offering is made to Xangô, the orixá associated with justice, and the exhibition notes online say, “When preparing this dish, one does not ask for justice, but for mercy.”

I was in the middle of a journalism fellowship at MIT when my father died from a sudden illness. This was about a month after Donald Trump took office again, and my husband, stuck in Senegal, couldn’t get a visa to come for the funeral. I took some time off to stay with my mother, then returned to the gray skies of Boston. I don’t know how to explain how isolating my grief was, how interacting with people felt exhausting, sharp at the edges, each encounter strained as if I had emerged from a dark room into blinding sunlight, the sudden stimulation causing me to double over, nauseated.

Since my father died … I’ve come to understand how profound a role he played in keeping me in the family orbit, without me realizing it. He was our mucilage, the glue of a complex, three-dimensional puzzle, binding us all together.

Growing up, I was always a mama’s girl, a Velcro child who could never let her out of my sight. My mother still loves to tell the story of how, on my first days at the preschool down the road from our house, I cried and cried until she returned at the end of the school day to pick me up. Eventually, the teachers begged her to stay and sit with me in the schoolroom until I calmed down. I grew out of it, obviously, and when I ran into one of my preschool teachers some years ago, she was amazed that I had grown up to live so far from my parents—across a continent first, then across an ocean. But all that distance didn’t seem difficult to overcome with what technology offered us. When I called home, my father would answer the phone. I’d give him a perfunctory hello and then ask him to pass it to Mom.

Since my father died, though, I’ve come to understand how profound a role he played in keeping me in the family orbit, without me realizing it. He was our mucilage, the glue of a complex, three-dimensional puzzle, binding us all together. Whenever I moved, zigzagging across the US, then across the world, he would organize our regular family video calls—on Skype or FaceTime or Zoom—and soon after I moved, he and my mother would show up on my doorstep, bearing gifts from home.

Some years ago, he began a subtle campaign to persuade me to move back to the United States. He would mention it more often on our calls. Then my siblings and aunts and uncles began asking me similar questions—When are you coming back for good? You’re not planning to stay there forever, are you?—prompted, perhaps, by his hints. Nothing against Senegal; he always loved his visits to the country with its endless seafood, its unparalleled tailors, its culture of deference toward elders. But he felt I had been gone long enough and it was time to come home.

It was around this time that I began organizing two trips to the US everty year instead of just one. It was an imperfect concession, I now know. Every time I exited the airport in St. Louis or Chicago, he was waiting for me, but time was moving so fast. Now I search my memory, and my mind imposes order on a series of remembered sensations of that first hug after a long trip, of how he started to look not just older but also smaller. As we age, we lose cartilage, the discs in our spines compress. We shrink into bone and sinew. Now that he’s gone, I’m not sure our family fits together like we used to.

One day, I forced myself to attend an open studio day for an artist I’d met in Cambridge; she was making work about water and its spirit, its energy, its capacity to shape the earth around it, all subjects of interest to me. There had been three or four opportunities to visit, and this one was the last, so I wanted to go, even though I also didn’t want to do anything at all.

A few other visitors came and went: an eminent historian of slavery, a psychologist, a doctoral student, another writer. I don’t know how we alighted on the subject of okra. I’d like to think that we were talking about the fruit’s striking crosscuts, little stars, a sacred geometry. Or that, maybe, since the artist’s work is about what the land remembers and reflects on enslavement in her native Louisiana, perhaps we were talking about cotton or sugar, and okra came up in a discussion about Southern foodways. It turns out that one of the visitors’ parents were from Nigeria, and by the end of our conversation she had invited us all over to share a meal—okra stew.

Again, I dragged myself there, bringing something—a bottle of wine, I think, maybe a dessert? At the host’s insistence, I brought Pepper, my eleven-pound dog, as a fun diversion for her kids. Pepper and I were early, and I remember standing in her kitchen, watching her peel shrimp, tossing the heads into a large pot for stock. I must have offered to help, but she said no, and I was given a glass of prosecco or a cocktail. We talked about books and traded academic gossip about our programs; we talked about Chicago, where we both had lived, and the special things that unite folks like me and her who had grown up in extremely religious families but have left religion behind.

The steam rose from the stock pot. The okra, some fresh, some frozen, went into a different pot, and in another pot still was a cream-colored fufu for a traditional Nigerian-style swallow. In went lobster meat, an addition that might happen only in New England. Pepper ran around the table with children in pursuit. Others arrived. Conversations started and splintered off to include newcomers. The rice cooker boiled away with rice for folks like me who had never adapted to fufu; in still another pot (how many burners did she have?) she prepped a sauce from scotch bonnets, or habaneros, and handfuls of secret ingredients that I missed when I blinked, building a complex, savory heat.

Okra flower. Photo by Creative Touch Imaging Ltd./NurPhoto via Getty Images

When everything was ready and turned out in pretty tureens on the table, we sat and passed around the white fufu and rice, the red pepper sauce, and the okra, no longer green but gone a brownish red and dotted with white seeds like tiny pearls. I took a small spoon of hot sauce and scooped a ladle of chunky okra stew and admired the draw, with all its promise, as it slid over the bed of rice. After a few bites, my eyes started to water. Grief, showing up again, always when it was least wanted. But the okra stew and hot pepper sauce had opened everyone’s sinuses, causing most folks to sniffle too, and suddenly I had the feeling that I wasn’t alone in my sorrow. They were all accompanying me, if unknowingly.

Wherever we had come from, we were all okra believers now, disciples of the slime.

I can’t be sure but sometimes I wonder if my love of okra is a penchant for loving neglected things. Things other people disdain. Or, as the poet January Gill O’Neil writes in her poem, “In Praise of Okra”:

No one believes in you

like I do. I sit you down on the table

& they overlook you

Or maybe my love for it came from the act of growing it, watching its cream-yellow flowers bloom, their centers the red of oxidized blood. And then I feel sheepish about this metaphor because it’s evocative of grossness and okra isn’t gross. That’s the whole point. Or maybe now I just love okra because my father did. He didn’t believe in Xangô or the Egyptian rituals of the afterlife. He would not have wanted to be a spirit that showed up from time to time, living in the breeze or in the trees, or waiting in the corners of rooms for offerings. For him, there was heaven and hell and that’s it. But, still, I think I feel closer to him when I eat it. Maybe, in my own way, I’m asking for mercy—for him, for me, and for this sometimes terrible and often beautiful world.